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RIP Christopher Lee

A late appreciation.

I’ve seen many men die right in front of me – so many in fact that I’ve become almost hardened to it. Having seen the worst that human beings can do to each other, the results of torture, mutilation and seeing someone blown to pieces by a bomb, you develop a kind of shell. But you had to. You had to. Otherwise we would never have won. — quoted here.

Outside in has been distracted, and slow to notice how many threads Christopher Lee tied together. Cinematic horror, naturally, and later Hollywood Sith promotion — so he had the dark counts nailed down completely — but the Deep State explorations had escaped my attention (as they tend to). Some indications here:

At some point during the war [Lee] moved from the LRDP to Winston Churchill’s even more elite Special Operations Executive, whose missions are literally still classified, but involved “conducting espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers.” The SOE was more informally called — and I can’t believe this somehow hasn’t been made into a movie yet — The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

“I’d always been fascinated by fairy stories, which in a sense is what these [Dracula] stories are, and what these films are too, of that particular type and of that particular period, the ’50s and ’60s. I was always fascinated by, as I said, fairy stories, fantasy, you know, demons, necromancers, gods and goddesses, everything that is out of our kin and out of our everyday world. I was always interested in enchantment and magicians and still am…

“But they’re very difficult to play, these characters, obviously because they’re so outlandish. And they don’t exist – yet – and consequently, when I read this [Prince of Darkness] dialogue… I said to them, oh, come on, you know, I’m not going to say any of these lines. Can you imagine somebody in front of a camera actually saying, I am the apocalypse? …this would sound ridiculous.”